pandemic news from FierceBioResearcher

A case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu has been confirmed in China, but authorities say it is another instance where the spread of the disease has been limited to a close blood relative. Read more...

Scientists at MIT are reporting that the shape of structures in the avian flu virus closely match sugars found in the respiratory tracts of birds. That key link has helped spread bird flu among Read more...

GlaxoSmithKline had to play a serious game of catch-up in its quest to develop a new vaccine for cervical cancer. Four years ago, Glaxo's vaccines division--GSK Bio--concluded that it was two years behind Merck's program for an HPV vaccine. In order to bridge that yawning gap, researchers at the company adopted a new approach developed by automaker Renault called the "one roof" approach. The company plucked a variety of experts it needed from different fields and put them together under …

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Scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas in Austin say that they've found a weakness in the flu virus--both common flu viruses as well as bird flu--that could be a very effective target for new antiviral drugs. The target is the nucleoprotein, the flexible tail loop of the flu protein, often referred to as NP in shorthand. Any changes in the tail prevent the NPs from stacking together, a process that's necessary before cells begin to create the virus. A new antiviral that …

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Just before Indonesia announced its forty-throed bird flu death, researchers around the globe got some welcome news. Indonesian health officials announced that they were taking off the restrictions on sharing the gene sequences of its avian flu virus. Those sequences, the genetic code to the virus, are considered crucial to understanding how the disease is changing. Indonesia has presented some of the most alarming cases of avian flu clusters, including family clusters where the disease …

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Scientists at the CDC reported a project failure late last week that many researchers in the field were only too happy to see. They engineered genetic changes to see if they could make the deadly A-H5N1 virus more easily transmittable among people. It didn't work. That doesn't mean that the virus, which has claimed 134 lives, can't mutate into a virus that could trigger a human pandemic. But it does mean that a mutation probably won't happen easily.

Undertaking their work in a …

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